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Call-Out Culture
Articles History and Value of COC Call-Out Culture Isn’t Toxic. You are. - Riley H, Medium "Every month or so, an article comes out screeching about how terrible, horrible, no good very bad “call-out culture” is. Before I get into that, I want to start from the beginning." "The idea of “calling out”, first and foremost, came from Black femmes on social media who were being violently harassed every single day. Rape threats. Death threats. Ban evasion. I watched as the idea of “calling out” developed around 2011–2012 on Tumblr, a site that had no real means to block someone or prevent them from harassing you in any way they saw fit." How Call Out Culture Snowballed & Why It’s Here To Stay - Katelyn Burns, EverydayFeminism "I know the day is coming. It’s only a matter of time. As a vocal member of the trans community with a large platform, I know a large call out is waiting for me someday. Someone somewhere is probably building a case against me as I type this. Trans women are especially vulnerable to call outs and expulsion from activist and community spaces and resources — I would be no exception. If you are a trans woman, chances are at least one of your friends has been forced to see a therapist because of an online call out." Criticisms of COC White Cis-Women Vs. The Rest Of Us: 3 Ways Toxic Call-Outs Reinforce Privilege "The core problem with back and forth discourse on toxic culture is that it’s become too personal. It’s less actual discussion of the issues and more teeing off on random activists on Twitter. Call outs are often used merely as a personal catharsis tool for white and cisgender activists." "1. Stereotyping Call out culture has become less about engaging with the actual issues at hand and more about litigating personal disputes. In the process, it’s people of color, trans women, and other marginalized people who get caught in the crossfire. "2. Tone Policing ... When trans people and people of color call out other activists, they are, in part, naming their oppression. For white and cisgender activists occupying the same space to then claim they’re too personally engaged and upset to be rational on the topic is called tone policing." "3. Depersonalization ... "these topics being discussed on social media have a direct impact on the lives of those who are marginalized, while white, cisgender people can have these theoretical discussions and just move on with their lives unaffected by racism and transphobia." 8 Steps Toward Building Indispensability (Instead of Disposability) Culture "4. Perpetrator/Survivor is a False Dichotomy There is an intense moral dynamic in social justice culture that tends to separate people into binaries of “right” and “wrong.” To be a perpetrator of oppression or violence is highly stigmatized, while survivorhood may be oddly fetishized in ways that objectify and intensify stories of trauma. “Perpetrators” are considered evil and unforgivable, while “survivors” are good and pure, yet denied agency to define themselves. Among the many problems of this dynamic is the fact that it obscures the complex reality that many people are both survivors and perpetrators of violence (though violence, of course, exists within a wide spectrum of behaviors). Within a culture of disposability – whether it be the criminal justice system of the state or community practices of exiling people – the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy is useful because it appears to make things easier. It helps us make decisions about who to punish and who to pity. But punishment and pity have very little to do with revolutionary change or relationship-building. What punishment and pity have in common is that they’re both dehumanizing." "5. Punishment Isn’t Justice Punishment is the foundation of the legal criminal justice system and of disposability culture. It’s the idea that wrongs can be made right by inflicting further harm against those who are deemed harmful. Punishment is also, I believe, a traumatized response to being attacked, the intense expression of the “fight” reflex. Activist writer Sarah Schulman discusses this idea in detail in her book, Conflict Is Not Abuse. It isn’t inherently wrong to want someone who hurt you to feel the same pain – to want retribution, or even revenge. But as Schulman also writes, punishment is rarely, if ever, actually an instrument of justice – it is most often an expression of power over those with less. How often do we see the vastly wealthy or politically powerful punished for the enormous harms they do to marginalized communities? How often are marginalized individuals put in prison or killed for minor (or non-existent) offences? As long as our conception of justice is based on the violent use of power, the powerful will remain unaccountable, while the powerless are scapegoated." Public Forgiveness: The Crucial Missing Step To Making Call Out Culture Non-Toxic “The intent of my call out is very explicitly to compel me to kill myself. I didn’t make a mistake, I don’t need training, I don’t need mediation, I am a monster.” "The dynamics of social media today have made disposability easier than ever before. It’s much easier to just cut people out of our lives when we aren’t seeing them around town or in our space on a day to day basis. Block and move on, block and move on — it’s an endless cycle in call out culture. Friend groups and activist spaces are asked to take sides; it’s activist trench warfare and it’s often this endless cycle that most frustrates activists." "Finding herself on the wrong side of social media blocks, G has struggled to even know what she’s supposed to be held accountable for, and she definitely cannot reach out to the people that have said she hurt them to offer an apology. “Because of a lingering fear of being put on display in public, I can’t apologize to any of these people. I understand that they’ve felt genuine pain and anger over things that I’ve done and I would give anything be able to apologize.” "As activists and feminists, our first priority should be to protect each other from harm, but at what cost? If we label somebody abusive and cast them from our spaces, at what point does it end? Once a space is deemed safe again, we shouldn’t continue recycling call outs until the target is dead. This is G’s long-term fear, “It’s not endless in the sense that repeated call outs will one day drive me to kill myself and I’ve accepted that, so there will be an end to it." 3 ways a call-out can go right - Everyday Feminism |YesMagazine.org:/Lee2017/Why I’ve Started to Fear My Fellow Social Justice Activists> :"Understand, even though I am using callouts as a prime example, I am not against them. Several times, I have been called out for ways I have carelessly exhibited ableism, transmisogyny, fatphobia, and xenophobia. I am able to rebound quickly when responding with openness to those situations. I am against a culture that encourages callouts conducted irresponsibly, ones that abandon the person being called out and ones done out of a desire to experience power by humiliating another community member." Examples Trans-fem indie game developer 'Porpentine Charity Heartscape', aka 'Porpentine', discusses at length her experiences as a trans-fem being treated as disposable and unwanted in queer/trans/feminist spaces leading up to this 2015 article for The New Inquiry: Hot Allostatic Load. "They said I controlled a misogynistic mob and was using it to attack people. (I had never been more alone.) I was called a pedophile, a [Culture|r[*pist]], an abuser (the typical dog whistles used in feminist spaces to evoke the dangerous tranny stereotype invading ur bathrooms.) Even when the rumors were debunked, even with a history of co-habitating respectfully with partners and a history of being a respectful tenant, the damage was never repaired. The purpose was to keep firing until I was gone, until every possible bad thing had been said about me. The reputation game was used to paint a vulnerable, isolated trans girl, too scared to leave her room most days, as having power which she did not have—power which my abusers, veterans of queer and artistic scenes with decades of institutional privilege, did have. It happened without warning or recourse, without a single attempt at conciliation. Multiple times I had noticed tension building and had asked explicitly for mediation. Each time this was refused. When you’re exiling someone for petty political reasons, it works best when they can’t tell their own story. By privately vocalizing concerns that I was being abused, I became a public target—presenting a false chronology to observers."https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/ "Very few people want to defend a target of disposability. I was told by one person that she couldn’t risk losing her job, another that she didn’t want to become a target too." "So when people write all those apologist articles about call-out culture and other instruments of violence in feminism, I don’t think they understand that the people who most deserve those things can usually shrug off the effects, and the normalization of that violence inevitably trickles down and affects the weak. It is predictable as water. Criminal justice applies punishment under the conceit of blind justice, but we see the results: Prisons are flooded with the most vulnerable, and the rich can buy their way out of any problem. In activist communities, these processes follow a similar pragmatism. Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales." Mobbing Porpentine specifically notes a common feature of call-out culture that is particularly pernicious, which she identifies as 'mobbing': "Mobbing is emotional abuse practiced by a group of people, usually peers, over a period of time, through methods such as gaslighting, rumor-mongering, and ostracism. It’s most documented in workplace or academic environments (i.e. key points of capitalist tension) but is thoroughly institutionalized into feminist, queer, and radical spaces as well. Here is why it is horrible: 1) It has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death. 2) The insidious nature of emotional abuse: How do you fight ostracism and rumors? They leave no bruises, they just starve you. 3) Mobbing typically occurs in places where the victim is trapped by some need or obligation: work, school, circles of friends. This can prolong exposure to damaging extremes. For these reasons, PTSD is an almost inevitable outcome of any protracted mobbing case." "Those who participate, even unwittingly, feel compelled to invest in the narrative of victims as monsters in order to protect their self-conception as a good person—group violence creates group culpability. For their ego they trade the career, health, community (and sometimes life) of the victim." "Accusations of sexual menace are a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act—the threat of black skin on innocent white, of trans bone structures on ethereal cis skeletons. ... Mobbing uses these rumors to trade a vague suspicion for the actual reality of violence. It’s like turning the corner and watching someone on the street having their teeth kicked in by a mob who assures you that just before you appeared, this person had committed some mysterious act which justifies limitless brutality." Damage Porpentine continues in her essay to describe at length the effects of this sort of abuse, the article is best read in full, but I add this last excerpt here for an insight: "I was, in effect, beaten until I had brain damage, over a long period of time. Unlike some other survivors of trauma, I was unable to heal because I was never separated from the source of the danger. I was never given the chance to vent, to express myself, to tell my side of the story—but I had to keep working, harder than ever, while being constantly exposed to violence. The pressure on me was not merely to survive but to display no signs of the incredible amounts of damage pouring into me daily. To never display the slightest hint of anger, to never cry, to not argue with people telling me horrible things. Every hint of damage was an excuse to further isolate and demonize me." Disposability "Feminism/queerness takes a vague disposability and makes it a specific one. The vague ambient hate that I felt my whole life became intensely focused—the difference between being soaked in noxious, irritating gasoline and having someone throw a match at you. Normal hate means someone and their friends being shitty toward you; radical hate places a moral dimension onto hate, requiring your exclusion from every possible space—a true social death." |BlackYouthProject:/Ziyad2018/My queerness won’t let me give up on my queerphobic Black parents> :"As I got more involved in activism, I was taught that people have no responsibility to teach those who harm them how not to further do so, and I still believe that deeply. I still believe that non-blood family can be just as crucial as blood, and we don’t have to hold onto the abusive bonds we didn’t choose just because they are there. Especially when bad blood kills queer children so regularly. I believe that people often learn best when we don’t hold their hands through their mistakes, and that calling out is an important practice. It’s what helped me make some of my most significant growth. This shit is not supposed to be easy. :But there is a difference between this type of tough love and no love at all. There is a difference between this and the idea that Black people become disposable as soon as they harm us. It is too easy to dispose of Black people. It is too easy to believe we can and should give up as soon as things get hard with people who do not know how to show care in the healthiest ways, but still do. That we should give no room for people in our families and communities to grow out of the oppressive ideas that have been conditioned into our DNA through intergenerational trauma. That because we have no responsibility to teach our harm-doers, we also have no responsibility to share healing possibilities with those who have only ever known the impossible." Cancel Culture A related culture is that of 'cancelling' celebrities who espouse intolerable social views in order to prevent them from continuing to profit from the communities (and allies of those) which they denigrate. |Twitter:/@PixelatedBoat2016/The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist> |KnowYourMeme://Milkshake Duck> Milkshake Duck is racist image References Category:Feminism Category:Social Justice Category:Abuse Category:2010's